Sam DonaldsonCo-host, ABC's Prime Time
Live;
panelist on This Week with
David Brinkley

"A lot of people are afraid of you. They think you're a bomb-thrower. Worse, you're an intolerant bigot. Speak to them....You talk about the Clintons as members of the counterculture, the elitists, the left-wingers. How can you have an accommodation with the President when you read him out of `the Americans,' as you put it?"
-- Sam Donaldson's questions to Newt Gingrich on This Week with David
Brinkley, November 13, 1994.

"Reagan got his taxation program through, which was to cut taxes to the bone. Mr. Clinton's going to get his program through, which is to raise taxes to the sky. And let us hope, Cokie, that it doesn't turn out to have a similar fate. What Reagan did was destroy the economy!"
-- On This Week with David Brinkley, March 28, 1993.

"To what extent, if any, do you think the political rhetoric to which you just referred, has helped cause a climate in which people could go in that direction? In other words, the rhetoric which says, not just against big government, or liberal government, or dishonest government, but 'I'm against government, government is the enemy?'"
-- To Morris Dees on the Oklahoma City bombing, This Week with David
Brinkley, April 23, 1995.

George Will: "The Republican proposal is to increase spending on medical care 5.4 percent for the next seven years....It is a cut against projected increases."
Donaldson: "That's right, but that is a cut. May I just, without getting ad hominem here. Not too long ago, the Will family had a welcome addition, a child. So your budget perhaps had to increase to take care of the welcome addition. Yet if it could not increase enough to care for the welcome addition sufficiently, that's cut. That's a cut, you don't seem to recognize this, you or Bill."
-- Exchange about Medicare "cuts", This Week with David Brinkley, May 14, 1995.